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Israeli army fans out cities after deadly Palestinian attacks

The Israeli military began deploying hundreds of troops in cities across the country on Wednesday to assist police forces in countering a wave of deadly Palestinian shooting and stabbing attacks that have created panic across the country

By JODI RUDORENSEWELL CHANThe Washington Post

Wed., Oct. 14, 2015

JERUSALEM—The Israeli authorities erected roadblocks and checkpoints in some Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem on Wednesday and deployed hundreds of police officers and soldiers on the roads and buses, a response to a series of Palestinian knife assaults that the government called a “wave of terrorism.”

In the late afternoon, Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian teenager who had rushed toward them with a knife at the Damascus Gate of the Old City, a police spokeswoman said. Several Palestinian witnesses said they had seen the teenager, who was wearing military-style fatigues, have an argument with his father and run toward the gate, but that he had not attacked anyone.

Israeli policemen run looking for a possible stabbing suspect in Jerusalem on Wednesday. An attacker stabbed and wounded an older woman as she was about to board a bus near the central bus station in West Jerusalem, according to police. (Dusan Vranic / AP)

Israeli security forces and forensic police stand next to the body of a knife-wielding man who stabbed and moderately wounded a woman near Jerusalem's central bus station on Wednesday. (MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP/Getty Images)

A few hours later, an attacker stabbed and wounded an older woman, who was about 70, as she was about to board a bus near the central bus station in West Jerusalem, according to the police. A police officer saw the assailant with a knife and shot him, the police said. It was not immediately clear if he was killed.

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Seven Israeli Jews have been killed this month by Palestinian assailants, including three on Tuesday in Jerusalem: two in an attack on a bus at the juncture of Jewish and Arab areas, and one pedestrian in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood who was rammed by a vehicle and then hit with a meat cleaver.

An estimated 30 Palestinians, several of them attackers killed by the authorities, have died in the violence, most of it centred in Jerusalem.

As stabbing attacks around Israel continue, Israeli police are trying to find new way of monitoring the streets of Jerusalem. (Ilia Yefimovich)

Palestinians have called the new security measures by Israeli authorities a disproportionate response of collective punishment that will only worsen the tensions.

“East Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine,” Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestinian Authority, said on Voice of Palestine radio. “If they think that they can reach security with these measures, they are wrong. The Palestinian people will continue to defend themselves. We don’t have an army, and no one can compare between us and the Israeli army, but we will defend ourselves with all what is available.”

After an emergency Cabinet meeting Tuesday night, the Israeli government directed the police “to impose a closure on, or to surround, centres of friction and incitement in Jerusalem, in accordance with security considerations.” It also authorized the deployment of 300 security guards to patrol public transportation.

The public security minister, Gilad Erdan, approved steps Wednesday that would make it easier for civilians to obtain gun permits. Several Israelis, he said, had helped the police stop assailants.

In Jabel Mukaber, a vast Palestinian area of hilly roads in East Jerusalem, where the two bus attackers Tuesday were from, the police closed one of three entrances to the neighbourhood. Another was half-closed. Some residents were stopped for questioning, but others were waved through.

“More than 50,000 people live here, and they are punishing the entire village,” complained a man who asked to be identified by his nickname, Abu Anas, and who said he was trying to take his teenage son to a health clinic. “This is a racist decision and will only bring about more violence in their neighbourhoods.”

Seven Israelis and 31 Palestinians, including children and assailants, have been killed in two weeks of bloodshed in Israel, Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. (MOHAMAD TOROKMAN)

The new security measures seek to halt a series of seemingly spontaneous acts by young people unconnected with any formal political movement, as many observers have expressed alarm that the situation threatens to spiral into a third intifada, or uprising.

But in the daily newspaper Maariv, the columnist Ben Caspit, a frequent critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said that the Israeli leader was “dividing Jerusalem” and that the “partial blockade” on Arab neighbourhoods “will not last and certainly will not stop stabbers.”

Alon Ben-David, writing in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, said, “The last remnants of the illusion of the unified Jerusalem are being erased.”

“It is true that an absolute majority, perhaps even 99 per cent, of the Palestinian population is not participating in the current confrontation, but a few dozen terrorists are enough to unravel the last seams of the coexistence illusion,” he said.

Also in Yediot Aharonot, military-affairs columnist Alex Fishman warned, “This terrorism by individuals could become civil war: Jews against Arabs.”

Secretary of State John Kerry, in remarks at an event Tuesday night in Cambridge, Mass., sponsored by Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said that he had been in touch with Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, over the weekend and that “we’re working on trying to calm things down.”

Kerry also said he intended to visit the region “soon at some point appropriately and try to work to re-engage and see if we can’t move that away from this precipice.”

At the Damascus Gate, Israeli police said the young man who was killed on Wednesday seemed nervous, and that as they approached him, he had charged at them with a knife. He was killed on the spot, the police said.

A crowd of Palestinians quickly formed behind the police barriers as scores of Israeli officers stood around the teenager’s body. After days of similar shootings by Israeli forces, the Palestinians expressed outrage at what they called a barrage of bullets they had seen. Some accused the police of planting a knife next to the body after the shooting.

“They killed him, more than 20 bullets hit his body, and this is only because he was Palestinian,” said Mohammed Jayusi, 27, one of more than 100 people who stood behind police barriers waiting for the teenager’s body to be removed from the scene.

Israeli officials have defended the new measures as proportionate and necessary.

Israeli border policemen stand guard as Palestinian youths pass through a newly placed checkpoint in Jabel Mukaber, in an area of the West Bank that Israel captured in a 1967 war and annexed to the city of Jerusalem October 14, 2015. (RONEN ZVULUN)

“First, the goal is to calm people,” Interior Minister Silvan Shalom, who is from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said on Israeli radio. “After that, maybe to take more in-depth steps. You can’t, right this minute, take steps without first making plans, without preparation and training.”

He promised that “those neighbourhoods that were not involved will not be affected,” but he added that “there will also be punitive measures that will be very dramatic” for those responsible for the violence.

Shalom blamed the Palestinians for abetting the violence. “There is no reason for a 13-year-old boy to take up a knife and commit such an act,” he said. “It’s only because he was instilled with hatred from kindergarten to school age. They are told that Jews have no right to live here, or any right to live at all. And this incitement has to stop.”

He also said that he had decided to revoke the residency status of 19 residents of East Jerusalem because the authorities suspected that they were involved in the recent attacks. The move would also revoke benefits like health insurance for their families.

“Residency was revoked in the past, but not on a large scale,” Shalom said Wednesday. “The idea now is to do it immediately. Anyone who took part in an act of terror should not be a resident of the state of Israel. It’s my decision.”

In Jabel Mukaber, cars were turned back at one of the neighborhood’s entrances. Ahmad Jaber, 26, a construction worker, said he was trying to go to the house of an Israeli just beyond the checkpoint to pick up some aluminum. Instead, he had to drive a circuitous route to the one exit that was open — a 40-minute journey instead of the usual few minutes.

“They were very rude, and they told me to turn around,” he said of the border guards.

At another exit to the neighbourhood, where border guards had set up a checkpoint, Walla Qasem, 24, who was wearing a beige hijab and a long black coat, was about 15 metres away when an officer barked at her in Hebrew, “Put your hands up and keep them up.”

It took only a few minutes for him to look through her small black handbag, but it frightened her.

“I was very scared they were going to make me take my veil off,” said Qasem, who was waiting to be picked up for a driving lesson.

“He asked me about the ring. He said, ‘What is that?’” she said, referring to the band she received for her engagement a few days ago, on a finger still showing henna from the celebration.

She added, “Because they’re carrying these long guns, I was very scared.”

In Issawiya, the site of frequent clashes between young Palestinians and Israeli forces, troops bolstered security at a checkpoint that has been in place on and off since an Israeli gas station was vandalized last fall.

An army jeep joined an armoured border police vehicle on a rocky plateau overlooking the area, and more than a dozen officers — some from the military, some from the blue-uniformed regular police force and some in border-police khaki — held rifles as they inspected cars going in and out.

“It’s a difficult situation; it’s not convenient for anyone,” said one member of the border police force, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to talk publicly. “It’s not what we want, it’s what we need to do.”

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